Information Technology and the World

The name of this blog, Information Technology and the World, may seem grandiose. It probably is, but then my plans for it are also grandiose. I want us – you and me – to explore three issues: (1)the impact of information technology on business and society; (2) the impact of society on information technology; and (3) the lessons that each domain can teach the other, including both the possibilities and the limits of what technology and society can accomplish.

Name:
Location: Chicago, Illinois, United States

I have worked in construction, petroleum, software and consumer electronics. Professionally, I am a physicist, and engineer, and an IT professional.

Wednesday, August 29, 2007

Becoming the Master of My Web Site

I run a very small consultancy specializing in helping organizations make money from their information technology expenditures.

My web site - www.ghco.biz - has been primarily brochure ware, which I use to introduce my company and my services to prospective clients. Because of an excellent design and implementation – by Konlon & Associates ( www.knolon.com) – it has served this purpose quite well.

I now want to do more with it. I want to use it to store and distribute white papers that are too long for this blog, and to keep my clients and colleagues up to date on what I am doing. I cannot justify having a permanent web designer on my staff and I cannot keep the site up to date using a contractor because turnaround time for modifications is just too long.

So, can I maintain and update it myself? Up to now I have not been able to do it. The good news noted above – it really is a cool site – is accompanied by bad news: it is coded in native html and I am not an html programmer. I found this out after a week of fruitless experiments which the site barely survived.

During this trauma, I kept asking myself why no one had built a simple converter that would accept an MSWord document (my preferred word processor) and turn it into an html page. It seemed to me that if would be a fairly easy task for a competent programmer, but as a colleague of mine observed long ago, everything is easy until you actually have to do it. Luckily for me, I ran into Marcus Ketel of WeseditorPlus (http://www.webeditorplus.com/). at a meeting of the Illinois Technology Association. He told me about WebeditorPlus. I tried it and it works. It has an interface that looks very much like MSWord, and the web pages look just fine.

A passing irony: In a prior post to this blog, I argued that Software as a Service is not ready for prime time. WebeditorPlus has proven me wrong.


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